Hi,
let me chime in a bit as I am both a Fedora user _and_ Hungarian. :-)
And sorry for keeping the topic alive.
Mike McCarty írta:
Andy Green wrote:
Unfortunate that he brought the subject of the 'signal-to-noise' ratio
up, then.
What happens in the computer world generally is of interest to users
of Fedora, I would suppose.
Running Fedora is a political choice that has ramifications. Microsoft
Bah. I run Fedora for my own reasons, none of which is political.
Saying that your [software] choice is apolitical and
having a name like yours is amusing, even if you don't have
that 'h' in your surname. :-)
Any choice has consequences, both positive and negative.
- specifically - hate the fact you choose to run Free software and want
to take control of that possibility. If Microsoft succeed in their
"Microsoft" is not an entity. It is a corporation, made up of people.
Yeah, the devil is in the details. And Microsoft is made of such
small details like Steve Ballmer. :-)
I am sure that most/all of the employees of Microsoft neither know nor
care what OS I have on my machine.
Know? Certainly not. Care? Surely. Of course, they are not interested
in you or me personally but they are interested in masses. Preferably
having 100% market share with silent users. But they fear of individuals
since one man's scream cannot be suppressed by a thousand people's silence.
plans, you won't be able to run Fedora legally any more. For that
Nah.
reason I will occasionally post about events concerning Microsoft that I
consider important whether you like it or not.
Then here are some other events, somewhat correlated with another set of
articles about the Australian tax software situation that were published in
the last few weeks. There's a (nowadays almost mandatory) tax software
issued by the Hungarian tax office that only runs on Windows. It's written
in Delphi. Last year there was a pilot project (driven by the tax office)
to port it to Linux using Kylix. Yes, the already dead, out-of-production
old and slow Kylix. The project failed for several reasons, using Kylix was
one of them if not the main one. The developers' excuses (for discontinuing
the project) that e.g. Linux distros don't use "standard" (== Microsoft)
fonts,
different distros use different fonts and different directory layout
were not
surprising since these were the answers they got when they asked people
at FSF Hungary and at the Association of Hungarian Linux Users to beta-test
the software. Among the criticism the tax office got was the main deficiency
of the software: the original handles many different forms (corporate
tax, etc)
but the Linux port only handled personal tax returning. Apparently the tax
office wasn't interested in helping corporate users escape from Microsoft.
Some months after this project failed, suddenly an alliance was formed
between BSA Hungary (cover organization for Microsoft, at least in Hungary)
and the tax office and the main cited reason was that BSA can help
discovering tax fraud, mainly unpayed VAT. There's VAT over everything
you can buy, most things have 20% VAT. So if you use pirated software,
you not only owe the software-maker money, you also owe the state tax.
Problem is that you can expect stricter scrutiny from the tax office when
you say you don't use Microsoft. The raid at Microsoft was the direct result
of mucking with software makers and large corporate users in Hungary.
It's unfortunate that so many of these exchanges degenerate into
this sort of fencing.
Duelling is forbidden since eighteen-hundred-something in
all European countries. :-) I don't intend to continue his thread
but I wanted to share the above.
Best regards,
Zoltán Böszörményi
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